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[krasnoarmeets]

Those of you old enough to remember Baldur's Gate 2, which in my opinion was one of Bioware's crowning achievements, would no doubt recall the often hostile interactions between potential rival LIs of the PC. I loved it, for obvious reasons. I also loved the funny things they would say at times, particularly Minsc - the references to whom you can't help but notice in ME2. Particularly inspiring was even the limited degree of intercompanion relations. As I recall there was a romance that flared between two separate companions in the story aside from the standard LI for the PC.
I, personally, would love to see that kind of interaction in DA2. Whatever happened to companions flirting with each other and disappearing into each others' tents.
I think it would help make the companions seem a little more believable if they interacted with each other to a fuller extent... how about a little bit of competition for the PC in the world of romance?
Thoughts, people?

[David Gaider]

You know... and I say this as one of the people who wrote BG2... I'm all for nostalgia, but let's not forget that the industry has changed in the last ten years. Not only that but our circumstances have changed. BG2 was a great game, and I'll always remember it fondly, but the company that could survive on its sales would need to be a lot smaller than BioWare is now.

Me, I'd love to work on a game like BG2 again. I'm one of the people in this company that keeps trying to push us as much in that direction as we can go-- but there are limits as to how far that is, and as big a fan as I am of that sort of game I do truly understand why that is. I'm sure nobody enjoys hearing how their favorite type of game isn't considered profitable enough for big companies like they were 10 years ago (here I'm tempted to link to that Escapist article again) but there it is, for good or ill.

[David Gaider]

Blastback wrote...
But would it be possible to have NPC party members begin romantic relationships with each other in game?  I think that that's what the OP was asking.

Well, I was responding to where the thread was heading-- not the OP's question in particular.

I suppose party members could romance each other. We've talked about it off and on-- I just don't remember it being all that fondly thought-of even back in BG2. If we did it again I think it'd have to be at the player's direction, as opposed to them simply being a spectator. Hard to say. That question doesn't have anything to do with BG2 in particular, beyond that fact that words were far cheaper back in those days so adding more never seemed like much of an obstacle.

Modifié par David Gaider, 14 septembre 2010 - 02:36 .

[David Gaider]

Knight Templar wrote...
That is still a strange thought. Being limited in what characters say. I mean, it makes sense but it's a strange thing to wrap your head around.

Even if there's no voice-over and cinematics attached to dialogue, you still have to consider translation costs. Ten years ago, the cost of translating BG2 into different languages amounted to about $1 per word. That wasn't a cheap development cost for a small company to bear.

If there's no translation-- well, then you can include as many words as you think your audience has the patience to read. Which is dwindling, I think (or, at least, that's the common perception).

[David Gaider]

Brockololly wrote...
I understand that but at the same time I wonder though- how do people in the industry know that a game more in the vein of BG2 wouldn't be profitable or successful in today's market if no one is even trying to make one?

That's an excellent question. Conventional industry wisdom is always incontrovertible until it's proven wrong. It's like the commonly-held belief that Everquest's 400,000 subscribers was about the most that an MMO could hope for... until, whoops! There's World of Warcraft! Probably not the example you were hoping for, I imagine.

Probably more topical was the belief (until the time when BG came into play, I think) that RPG's were dead-- simply not feasible. These things are cyclical, without a doubt.

Even so, in a way the perception becomes the truth. The media plays a big role in this. If you show a game to the media and their reaction is "wow, that looks like something that's way out of date" then that's what they're going to say. If your project isn't viewed as a triple-A game, you're not going to get triple-A coverage. Ask independant game-makers how difficult it is to get media attention and get awareness out there that their game even exists.

I mean I can remember earlier in DAO's development that some of the marketing speak was that DAO was basically taking the core of BG and dressing it up with modern technology (which it pretty much was). Wasn't DA successful, both critically and commercially?

It wasn't BG "dressed up"... in fact, how many threads were there that DAO wasn't enough like BG? Strange how perceptions change. We always said that DA is the spiritual successor to BG, meaning the things that were important to us in BG remain true in DA. Not that features are the same, beyond a return to a larger party and tactical combat (which we hadn't done since BG).

DAO was successful, though, that's true. Insofar as it sold well. Profitability, for a game that was so long in development, may be another matter... but I think fans and developers will probably always have very different bars on what constitutes success. No way around that.

I'd love to see BioWare do an old school iso view text only BG style RPG- obviously not as a huge, big budget project but even as an experimental DLC or some smaller project to lead in to a core DA game maybe. I like some voice acting in games and all, but it just seems its gotten to the point now where VO (and especially player VO) is eating away at content and player choice such that we're just playing interactive movies.

I would tend to agree. I'd like to see developers having the ability to do smaller, "art house" projects much the way that the film industry does. I suspect, however, that "cheap" according to modern standards would not equal the triple-A games you were used to 10 years ago. BG2, for instance, still took 70 people about a year and a half to create. That's not cheap, and I'm not certain that the number of people it would take to make a similar game today would be so much smaller... especially compared to the fact that whatever game they created would never get the same chance at success that it would have 10 years ago.

Let's also not forget that the economy is not doing very well. Such an "art house" project might very much be considered a luxury... something a company in a comfortable enough situation might indulge in as a risky venture. I'm not sure that any developer is in that situation right now, but maybe I'm wrong. There's all sorts of arguments one could make about what's good business sense on this front, but I'm not the one to make them. I don't decide what BioWare or EA creates-- but I get why they're risk-averse, considering the state of things. It's not rosy.

Anyway. Enough of my cold-water doses of reality. I doubt these sorts of statements are particularly welcome in these parts anyhow.

Modifié par David Gaider, 14 septembre 2010 - 04:05 .

[David Gaider]

Ortaya Alevli wrote...
Damn... over here we charge about $ .1 per word. I feel pretty much like I've been raped for my entire life.

That's not $1 per language, that's $1 in total for however many translations we did. And it's probably not that accurate-- it was ten years ago, remember. I just recall it being waaay more expensive than I would have thought.